She bears the burden no man can know. Her hands, dry and cracked from her toil, move busily as she bends over her ceaseless work.
A nursemaid, caregiver and nurturer to her children, constantly on call day and night, worrying, fretting, preparing. Wiping tears from their eyes when the children fall, dispensing wisdom, nerves fraying at silly questions and chores not yet done. Mending clothes, stretching the food, making do when all she wants is a time to close her eyes and be at peace.
Her own tears fall when solitude eventually finds her in a woozy, exhausted state, but there is no-one to wipe them from her eyes. As she pours the warm water from the cracked jug over her ravaged body, her mind still races with the thoughts of the children she must feed and shelter.
There were times when she thought that surely death would be a welcome reprieve from the endless violence, the humiliation and the pain of bruises and shattered bones left to heal themselves. From the pain of the petrol he poured onto her body and set alight, laughing at the sound of her screams of agony and the sight of her begging him for help.
She sees it anew as though it were yesterday. Feels the excruciating coolness of the water her son throws on her burning, smouldering flesh. His anxious young voice cracking with pity and despair. Being rushed to hospital and waking up with only memories of pain where her legs once were.
The police want her to lay a charge against him but her children beg her to spare their father. As always, the mother’s heart, not blackened by the flames that licked her flesh, succumbs to their pleas.
A burnt shell, she arrives back home to find out he has left her and is living with another woman nearby. Oh Allah, why do you test me with such hardship? How can I bear so much pain? Where is Your mercy? I am Your servant. Deliver me from this torture!
The wheels of the low metal trolley squeak and turn with excruciating heaviness as she uses her rough hands on the hard tar to propel her along the road. Each day she pushes herself into central Johannesburg to buy the brooms and mops she sells from her home to support her children. She does not complain any longer. She is still a woman, looking after her children, like all other mothers do. So does the phoenix rise from the ashes of violence.
Weak bladders, hot tempers and servitude
Sometimes when you are married and living in domestic bliss you get these moments where you could just drop what you are holding and move to another country. Change your name. Dye your hair. The little things that have been grinding you down build up to a point where you feel one day, “fuck it, this is not what I signed up for”. At least if I murdered all of them I would probably be out in five years. This is South Africa.
Now let me do the cliché thing and tell you that I love my husband. I certainly love my daughter more than anything else in life. And Lord, shoot me for bothering, but I love my step-daughter too. We have a fairly peaceful, happy home, all things considered.
Then WHY do they all make me so stressed I can feel my hair greying when they are at home? Why do I feel my boobs begin to sag after one hour around them? Why do I feel I can never win?
And no, it’s not that time of the month. I checked.
Every day I calmly tell myself that today I am going to be as cool as a cucumber. I’m going to be happy and walk around with a big smile. No matter what any of them say to me, I will not react negatively. I am a fucking island. It usually lasts five minutes.
Yesterday it all started when I went to pick up my daughter from school. Aayah is a total dreamer. She got into trouble previously because she forgets to go to the toilet at break and then asks to go during class. Then she will muck around in the bathroom, dreaming and singing to herself for perhaps fifteen to twenty minutes. Eventually when she gets back to class she has missed the whole lesson and the teacher and class get disrupted on her account.
So I did what any good mother would do - I threatened her on pain of… well, pain, that if she didn’t stop it there would be Consequences. And all was well in the land of Aayah for a while.
However, this afternoon, as I arrived to collect her, she was on her way back from the bathroom and the teacher informed me that she had again been going to the toilet during class constantly. I gave her a lecture in the car and we headed off to the library. As soon as we got there she started performing for the toilet again – even though she had just gone about ten minutes before. So she had to go to the public library toilet which smells of urine and in which there is no toilet tissue. OK. So now I’m at boiling point. After the library we went straight to Pick n’ Pay to buy bread.
“Mummy, I need the toilet again. I need it really badly.”
Wow. Add to that the everyday homework drama where half an hour of homework is transformed into three hours of telling her every five minutes to concentrate on her work and stop dreaming, punctuated by about ten trips to the toilet, and we have a mother that is ready to jump off a handy bridge.
So I ask myself: does she really have some kind of a problem with her bladder or is this kid just winding me up?
Then I come to the realisation that I am the bad one here. I just have no patience. Is there some kind of magical elixir, a pill perhaps, that I can swallow? “Patience in 5 minutes – guaranteed!” Wouldn’t that be deliciously easy…
Kids are just kids, and I need to admit that I have issues with anger.
The same hot temper gets fired up when my husband gets home. Everything he says to me, I want to jump down his throat for, and make him see that he is wrong and I am right. When I look at my own behaviour afterwards I see a fishwife staring me in the face.
I’m not saying they don’t all have their faults. But my need for control overpowers everyone, even the person I am inside. It’s as if I need everything to be so perfect it could be straight out of a magazine. I suppose that my past has left me with such strong feelings of helplessness that now I want to exert my will and authority over everyone to make sure I am never treated badly again. I expect Aayah to be perfect because I want her to grow up not making the mistakes I made.
Every night after I have put Aayah to bed I regret the harsh words I have spoken to her. I ask myself: today did I build my child up or did I break her down? Did I shatter her self-confidence? Did my kind words, hugs and kisses outweigh my shouts and criticisms? Just about every night I fall lower in my estimation as a good parent.
Today it has been a full hour since she came home from school and I have not yet shouted. I have calmly and patiently asked her to do her work quickly, promising to read her a story if she finishes before 5pm.
Wish me luck.
English skills
I know I live in South Africa, but I find it intolerable when I see people whose home language is English, who presumably at least studied English right up until Matric, fail so miserably whenever they put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard). It’s like a pustule, a repulsive boil on my skin that I wish would go away but won’t.
I owe my career in journalism to the very fact that this irritates the living hell out of me. When I was twenty-one my provincial newspaper annoyed me so much with its constant spelling mistakes and grammatical faux pas that one day I picked up the phone and gave the Editor-in-Chief of the newspaper group a dressing-down for his employees’ inability to represent his newspapers in a professional manner. He immediately offered me a job as Chief Sub-Editor.
Microsoft Word Spell Check is not enough, people.
I was reminded of my pet hate when I read a local newspaper recently and saw with horror that the Editor’s letter was full of typical primary-school errors. Seriously, you shouldn’t be allowed to become a newspaper editor unless you have undergone some kind of screening test.
One cannot wish all Hindu’s a happy Diwali. That would translate into: you wish all Hindu is a happy Diwali.
And don’t you dare write that something is nerve-racking. It’s nerve-wracking.
Please do not say I could of, you should of, or they would of. It’s HAVE. I could HAVE killed you, but I won’t. You should HAVE paid more attention in class, but you were too busy passing badly-written notes around. They would HAVE passed Matric if they had studied English a little harder.
Back to the apostrophe. You can’t say “Put the hat back in it’s box”
That type of apostrophe is a contraction – it shortens a word.
It’s = it is
I’m = I am
You’re = you are
Can’t = can not
Isn’t = is not
Won’t = will not
And my personal favourite: people who write things like “John and Cassandra think their the cutest couple ever”
They’re = they are
Then we have people who have no idea how to apply words such as whom or shall in a sentence. I won’t even go there.
If you wish to provide your undoubtedly valuable opinion on something, please make an effort not to use the word “nice”.
Here is the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of nice:
nice
• adjective 1. pleasant; agreeable; satisfactory. 2. good-natured; kind. 3. satisfactory in terms of the quality described. 4. fine or subtle: a nice distinction. 5. archaic fastidious.
— ORIGIN original senses included "stupid" and "coy, reserved": from Latin nescius ‘ignorant’.
Please do not read a classic piece of literature, look at fine art or go to the ballet and say that you thought it was nice. The word nice, as you can see above, has various meanings in the English language, and in any case, surely you can be a little more imaginative and use some other adjectives? Here are a few useful ones:
Interesting, moving, delightful, alluring, refined, resplendent, magnificent, marvelous, ideal, stunning, bewitching, tasteful, absorbing, provocative, exquisite, seductive, tantalising, winning, winsome, engrossing, electrifying and magnetising.
Many people hold positions where they are issuing written communications to others. Journalists, bloggers, authors, PROs, managers and marketers need to up their game in terms of their English skills because it not only makes the writer look bad, but also casts an unprofessional pall over the organisation they represent.
Everyone makes mistakes. They are unavoidable. However, everyone who is in a communications role should ideally brush up on their English skills, if only to avoid having to feel guilty when they read blog posts like this one. That would be NICE.
Through the looking glass
Sometimes when I'm reading news on South Africa, I think I'm reading a post on the satirical news site www.hayibo.com. I laugh away, reading the ridiculous quotes and story. Then, a few paragraphs on, I realise it's actually real. And people have actually said those things.
Julius Malema himself is a walking Hayibo post. Everything that comes out of his mouth is prime fodder for the writers. They don’t even need to change anything.
Take, for instance, the story where he refuses to be nominated as Drama Queen at the Feather Awards, accusing organizers of questioning his sexuality. Or the one where he calls IFP leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi a “factory fault” and the IFP a “terrorist organisation”
Everything that spews forth from the retarded brat’s spittle-flecked mouth is pure hatred. No-one is spared his idiotic vitriol. Today I saw a journalist had used the words “no-one is spared his sharp tongue”. I would hesitate before I said that anything connected with JuJu is sharp. His whole being is blunt, rotund and ignorant. The sharpest part of him is his bald, shiny, vacuous head.
But everything, from Eskom’s tariff hikes to the ANC spending millions on cars for their ministers, makes me feel as though I’m living in some sort of surreal topsy-turvy world where day is night and wrong is right. All it means is that the spin doctors are doing their jobs, I suppose.
The scary part is that the youth of this country support Malema, the government supports the electricity hike and no-one can do anything about the ANC’s spending spree. The dollar has weakened, petrol has gone down and South African stocks have strengthened, but the price of food and basic necessities still goes up and service delivery still goes down. And no-one is going to stop it.
Welcome
Here it is - a little corner shop in cyberspace where you can browse my top-quality rambles, rants and ruminations to your heart’s desire. But if you break it, you bought it. Shoplifters will be hung, drawn and quartered, like in the good old days.